Sep 15
Huzzah for Outside Motivation
So recently I got switched over to do mac development at work. Being that I’ve only ever written anything worthwhile in C++/C#, it’s a pretty big step to switch over to writing production code in a language that I only first saw code of a few weeks ago.   The syntax of Objective-C is pretty counter-intuitive to a C++ developer even though objc is a C derivative. For the non-programmers out there, its kinda like going from eating with a fork to eating with chopsticks.
I’ve been procrastinating learning obj-c for about a year now. I’ve been planning to learn objective C to write a media organizer for my mac media center but have never actually gotten off my ass to start. Now that I have an artificially imposed outside deadline, however, I’m sitting at a coffee shop after work trying to figure this shit out. If only I could find some sort of similar outside motivators for other stuff I’m trying to do since I’m pretty terrible at self-motivation.
After an hour or so (including learning curve), here’s what I came up with: http://screencast.com/t/w8kRupWcuAm.  That’s after a day of programming exercises at work. Hopefully learning the rest of this stuff starts speeding up as I keep going. So far the biggest hurdle has been getting used to the new syntax.
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Underneath the different syntax of Objective C is some subtle difference in what it means to be object oriented as well. Objective C took its ideas from the poster child of OOP, Smalltalk.
Quote from Alan Key: “I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.”
Objective C uses “message passing” rather than function calls. There are some subtle differences, and big wins.